Definition of judgment
Alternative forms
Etymology
From Old French jugement.
Pronunciation
- enPR: jÅj'mÉ™nt, IPA: /ˈdÊ'ÊŒdÊ'.mÉ™nt/, SAMPA: /"dZVdZm@nt/
- Audio (US) [?]
Noun
judgment (plural judgments)
- The act of judging.
- The power or faculty of performing such operations; especially, when unqualified, the faculty of judging or deciding rightly, justly, or wisely; as, a man of judgment; a politician without judgment.
- The conclusion or result of judging; an opinion; a decision.
- (law) The act of determining, as in courts of law, what is conformable to law and justice; also, the determination, decision, or sentence of a court, or of a judge.
* Jeremy Taylor.
In judgments between rich and poor, consider not what the poor man needs, but what is his own.
* Shakespeare, Merchant of Venice, IV-i
Most heartily I do beseech the court To give the judgment.
- (theology) The final award; the last sentence.
Usage notes
See Judgment: Spelling for discussion of spelling usage of judgment versus judgement. Briefly, without the -e is preferred in law globally, and in American English, while with the -e is preferred in British English.
Like abridgment, acknowledgment, and lodgment, judgment is sometimes written with English spellings in American English, as judgement (respectively, abridgement, acknowledgement, and lodgement).
Further reading
Judgement (or judgment) is the evaluation of evidence in the making of a decision. The term has three distinct uses:
- Informal and psychological - used in reference to the quality of cognitive faculties and adjudicational capabilities of particular individuals, typically called wisdom or discernment.
- Legal - used in the context of legal trial, to refer to a final finding, statement, or ruling, based on a considered weighing of evidence, called "adjudication".
- Religious - used in the concept of salvation to refer to the adjudication of God in determining Heaven or Hell for each and all human beings.
References:
- Wiktionary. Published under the Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.
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